by Dean Koontz
In undershirt, jeans, and stocking feet, Michael answered the door. Tousled hair. Puffy face. Eyes heavy-lidded from the weight of a sleep not fully cast off. He must have dozed in his big green-leatherette recliner.
He looked adorable.
Carson wished he was grungy. Or slovenly. Or geeky. The last thing she wanted to feel toward a partner was physical attraction.
Instead, he looked as cuddly as a teddy bear. Worse, the sight of him filled her with a warm, agreeable feeling consisting largely of affection but not without an element of desire.
Shit.
“It’s just ten o’clock,” she said, pushing past him into the apartment, “and you’re asleep in front of the TV. What’re those orange crumbs on your T-shirt? Cheez Doodles?”
“Exactly,” he said, following her into the living room. “Cheez Doodles. You are a detective.”
“Can I assume you’re sober?”
“Nope. Had two diet root beers.”
He yawned, stretched, rubbed at his eyes with the back of one fist. He looked edible.
Carson tried to derail that train of thought. Indicating the massive green recliner, she said, “That is the ugliest lump of a chair I’ve ever seen. Looks like a fungus scraped out of a latrine in Hell.”
“Yeah, but it’s my fungus from Hell, and I love it.”
Pointing to the TV, she said, “Invasion of the Body Snatchers?”
“The first remake.”
“You’ve seen it like what—ten times?”
“Probably twelve.”
“When it comes to glamour,” she said, “you’re the Cary Grant of your generation.”
He grinned at her. She knew why. Her curmudgeonly attitude did not fool him. He sensed the effect that he had on her.
Turning away from him as she felt her face flush, Carson picked up the remote control and switched off the TV. “The case is breaking. We’ve gotta move.”
“Breaking how?”
“Guy jumped off a roof, smashed himself into alley jam, leaving a freezer full of body parts. They say he’s the Surgeon. Maybe he is—but he didn’t kill them all.”
Sitting on the edge of the recliner, tying his shoes, Michael said, “What—he’s got a kill buddy or a copycat?”
“Yeah. One or the other. We dismissed that idea too easily.”
“I’ll grab a clean shirt and a jacket,” he said.
“Maybe change the Cheez Doodle T while you’re at it,” she said.
“Absolutely. I wouldn’t want to embarrass you in front of some criminal scum,” he said, and stripped off the T-shirt as he left the room.
He knew exactly what he was doing: giving her a look. She took it. Good shoulders, nice abs.
CHAPTER 62
ERIKA ROAMED the silent mansion, pausing frequently to study Victor’s collection of European and Asian antiques.
As they did every night, the nine members of the household staff—butler, maids, chef, cleaning crew, gardeners—had retired to their quarters above the ten-car garage at the back of the property.
They lived dormitory-style, the sexes integrated. They were provided with a minimum of amenities.
Victor seldom needed servants after ten o’clock—even on those nights when he was home—but he preferred not to allow his household staff, all members of the New Race, to lead lives separate from the mansion. He wanted them to be available twenty-four hours a day. He insisted that the only focus of their lives should be his comfort.
Erika was pained by their circumstances. They were essentially hung on a rack, like tools, to await the next use he had for them.
The fact that her circumstances were not dissimilar to theirs had occurred to her. But she enjoyed a greater freedom to fill her days and nights with pursuits that interested her.
As her relationship with Victor matured, she hoped to be able to gain influence with him. She might be able to use that influence to improve the lot of the household staff.
As this concern for the staff had grown, she found herself less often despairing. Following her interests—and thus refining herself—was fine, but having a purpose proved more satisfying.
In the main drawing room, she paused to admire an exquisite pair of Louis XV ormolu-mounted boulle marquetry and ebony bas d’armoires.
The Old Race could create objects of breathtaking beauty unlike anything the New Race had done. This puzzled Erika; it did not seem to square with Victor’s certainty that the New Race was superior.
Victor himself had an eye for the art of the Old Race. He had paid two and a quarter million for this pair of bas d’armoires.
He said that some members of the Old Race excelled at creating things of beauty because they were inspired by anguish. By their deep sense of loss. By their search for meaning.
Beauty came at the expense, however, of certitude, efficiency. Creating a beautiful piece of art, Victor said, was not an admirable use of energy because it in no way furthered mankind’s conquest of itself or of nature.
A race without pain, on the other hand, a race that was told its meaning and explicitly given its purpose by its creator, would never need beauty, because it would have an infinite series of great tasks ahead of it. Working as one, with the single-minded purpose of a hive, all members of the New Race would tame nature, conquer the challenges of Earth as ordinary humanity had failed to do, and then become the masters of the other planets, the stars.
All barriers would fall to them.
All adversaries would be crushed.
New Men and New Women would not need beauty because they would have power. Those who felt powerless created art; beauty was their substitute for the power they could not attain. The New Race would need no substitute.
Yet Victor collected the art and the antiques of the Old Race. Erika wondered why, and she wondered if Victor himself knew why.
She had read enough literature to be sure that Old Race authors would have called him a cruel man. But Victor’s art collection gave Erika hope that in him existed a core of pity and tenderness that might with patience be tapped.
Still in the main drawing room, she came to a large painting by Jan van Huysum, signed and dated 1732. For this still life, Victor had paid more millions.
In the painting, white and purple grapes appeared ready to burst with juice at the slightest touch. Succulent peaches and plums spilled across a table, caressed by sunshine in such a way that they seemed to glow from within.
The artist realistically portrayed this ripe bounty yet managed, subtly and without sentimentality, to suggest the ephemeral quality of even nature’s sweetest gifts.
Mesmerized by van Huysum’s genius, Erika was subconsciously aware of a furtive scrabbling. The noise grew louder, until at last it distracted her from the painting.
When she turned to survey the drawing room, she at once saw the source of the sound. Like a five-legged crab on some strange blind mission, a severed hand crawled across the antique Persian carpet.
CHAPTER 63
DETECTIVE DWIGHT FRYE lived in a bungalow so overgrown with Miss Manila bougainvillea that the main roof and the porch roof were entirely concealed. Floral bracts—bright pink in daylight but more subdued now—dripped from every eave, and the entire north wall was covered with a web of vine trunks that had woven random-pattern bars across the windows.
The front lawn had not been mowed in weeks. The porch steps had sagged for years. The house might not have been painted for a decade.
If Frye rented, his landlord was a tightwad. If he owned this place, he was white trash.
The front door stood open.
Through the screen door, Carson could see a muddy yellow light back toward the kitchen. When she couldn’t find a bell push, she knocked, then knocked louder, and called out, “Detective Frye? Hey, Dwight, it’s O’Connor and Maddison.”
Frye hove into sight, backlit by the glow in the kitchen. He wove along the hall like a seaman tacking along a ship’s passageway in a troublesome swell.
&nbs
p; When he reached the front door, he switched on the porch light and blinked at them through the screen. “What do you assholes want?”
“A little Southern hospitality for starters,” Michael said.
“I was born in Illinois,” Frye said. “Never shoulda left.”
He wore baggy pants with suspenders. His tank-style, sweat-soaked undershirt revealed his unfortunate breasts so completely that Carson knew she’d have a few nightmares featuring them.
“The Surgeon case is breaking,” she said. “There’s something we need to know.”
“Told you in the library—I got no interest in that anymore.”
Frye’s hair and face glistened as if he had been bobbing for olives in a bowl of oil.
Getting a whiff of him, Carson took a step back from the door and said, “What I need to know is when you and Harker went to Bobby Allwine’s apartment.”
Frye said, “Older I get, the less I like the sloppy red cases. Nobody strangles anymore. They all chop and slice. It’s the damn sick Hollywood influence.”
“Allwine’s apartment?” she reminded him. “When were you there?”
“You listening to me at all?” Frye asked. “I was never there. Maybe you get off on torn-out hearts and dripping guts, but I’m getting queasy in my midlife. It’s your case, and welcome to it.”
Michael said, “Never there? So how did Harker know about the black walls, the razor blades?”
Frye screwed up his face as if to spit but then said, “What razor blades? What’s got you girls in such a pissy mood?”
To Michael, Carson said, “You smell truth here?”
“He reeks with it,” Michael said.
“Reeks—is that some kind of wisecrack?” Frye demanded.
“I’ve got to admit it is,” Michael said.
“I wasn’t half drunk and feelin’ charitable,” Frye said, “I’d open this here screen door and kick your giblets clean off.”
“I’m grateful for your restraint,” Michael said.
“Is that some kind of sarcasm?”
“I’ve got to admit it is,” Michael said.
Turning from the door, heading for the porch steps, Carson said, “Let’s go, let’s move.”
“But me and the Swamp Thing,” Michael said, “we’re having such a nice chat.”
“That’s another wisecrack, ain’t it?” Frye demanded.
“I’ve got to admit it is,” Michael said as he followed Carson off the porch.
As she thought back over her encounters with Harker during the past couple of days, Carson headed toward the car at a run.
CHAPTER 64
AFTER CUFFING JENNA'S WRISTS and ankles to the autopsy table in his bedroom, Jonathan Harker used a pair of scissors to cut away her clothes.
With a damp cotton ball, he gently cleaned the blood from around her left nostril. Already, the bleeding from her nose seemed to have stopped.
Each time that she began to wake, he used the squeeze bottle to dribble two or three drops of chloroform on her upper lip, just under her nostrils. Inhaling the fumes as the fluid rapidly evaporated, she retreated again from consciousness.
When the woman was naked, Jonathan touched her where he wished, curious about his reaction. Rather, he was curious about his lack of a reaction.
Sex—disconnected from the power of procreation—was the primary means by which members of the New Race relieved tension. They were available to one another on request, to a degree that even the most libertine members of the Old Race would find shocking.
They were capable of performance on demand. They did not need beauty or emotion or any form of tender feeling to stimulate their desire.
Desire in them did not encompass love, merely need.
Young men coupled with old women, old women with young women, young girls with old men, the thin with the fat, the beautiful with the ugly, in every combination, each with the sole purpose to satisfy himself, with no obligations to the other, with no greater affection than they had toward the food they ate, with no expectation that sex would lead to a relationship.
Indeed, personal relationships between members of the New Race were discouraged. Jonathan sometimes suspected that as a species they were hardwired to be incapable of relationships in any of the ways that the Old Race experienced and defined them.
Couples committed to each other are impediments to the infinite series of conquests that is to be the uniform purpose of every member of the New Race. So are friendships. So are families.
For the world to be as one, every thinking creature must share the same drive, the same goal. They must live by a system of values so simplified as to allow no room for the concept of morality and the differences of opinion that it fosters.
Because friendships and families are distractions from the great unified purpose of the species, the ideal citizen, Father says, must be a loner in his personal life. As a loner, he is able to commit his passion fully to the triumph and the glory of the New Race.
Touching Jenna as he wished, unable to stir within himself the need that passed for desire, Jonathan suspected that his kind were also hardwired to be incapable of—or at least disinterested in—sex with members of the Old Race.
With their basic education via direct-to-brain data downloading comes a programmed contempt for the Old Race. Contempt, of course, can lead to a sense of righteous domination that includes sexual exploitation. This does not happen with the New Race, perhaps because their programmed contempt for nature’s form of humanity includes a subtle element of disgust.
Among those created in the tanks, only Father’s wife was allowed desire for one of the Old Race. But in a sense, he was not of the Old Race anymore, but was the god of the New.
Caressing Jenna, whose body was lovely and whose exterior form could pass for that of any woman of the New Race, Jonathan not only remained detumescent but also became vaguely repulsed by her.
How strange that this lesser creature, who was the dirty link between lower animals and the superior New Race, nevertheless might have within her the thing that Jonathan himself seemed to be missing, the organ or the gland or the neural matrix that enabled her to be happy nearly all the time.
The time had come to cut.
When she groaned and her eyelids fluttered, he applied a few more drops of chloroform to her upper lip, and she subsided.
He rolled a wheeled IV rack beside the table. From it hung a bag of glucose-saline solution.
He tied a rubber-tube tourniquet around Jenna’s right arm and found a suitable blood vessel. He inserted an intravenous cannula by which the glucose-saline would be infused into her bloodstream, and removed the tourniquet.
The drip line between the solution bag and the cannula featured a drug port. He inserted a large, full syringe of a potent sedative, which he would be able to administer in multiple, measured doses, as required.
To keep Jenna perfectly still during dissection, he must put her in deep sedation. When he wanted her awake to answer questions that he might have about what he found inside her, he could deny her the sedative.
Because she might cry out even during sedation and alarm the residents in the apartment below, Jonathan now wadded a rag and stuffed it in her mouth. He sealed her lips with duct tape.
When he pressed the tape in place, Jenna’s eyes fluttered, opened. For a moment she was confused, disoriented—and then not.
As her eyes widened with terror, Jonathan said, “I know that your kind can’t turn off physical pain at will, as we can. So I’ll wake you as seldom as possible to get your explanation of what I find inside you.”
CHAPTER 65
WITH A SUCTION-ADHERED emergency beacon on the roof above the driver’s door, Carson cruised fast on surface streets.
Struggling to absorb everything she had told him, Michael said, “The guy you saw in Allwine’s apartment, he owns a movie theater?”
“The Luxe.”
“The nutcase who says he’s made from parts of criminals and brought al
ive by lightning—he owns a movie theater? I would have thought a hot-dog stand. A tire-repair shop.”
“Maybe he’s not a nutcase.”
“A hamburger joint.”
“Maybe he’s what he says he is.”
“A beauty salon.”
“You should’ve seen what he did with those quarters.”
“I can tie a knot in a cherry stem using my tongue,” Michael said, “but that doesn’t make me supernatural.”
“I didn’t say he was supernatural. He says part of what the lightning brought him that night, in addition to life, was…an understanding of the quantum structure of the universe.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
“I don’t know,” she admitted. “But somehow it explains how he makes the coins vanish.”
“Any half-good magician can make a coin vanish, and they’re not all wizards of quantum physics.”
“This was more than cheap magic. Anyway, Deucalion said some of their kind are sure to have a strong death wish.”
“Carson—what kind?”
Instead of answering his question, aware that she must lead him a careful step at a time toward her ultimate revelation, Carson said, “Allwine and his friend were in the library, poring through aberrant psychology texts, trying to understand their anguish.”
“Don’t drive so fast.”
Accelerating, Carson said, “So the books weren’t pulled off the shelves in a struggle. There wasn’t a struggle. That’s why the scene was so neat in spite of the apparent violence.”
“Apparent? Allwine’s heart was cut out.”
“Hearts. Plural. But he probably asked his friend to kill him.”
“‘Hey, pal, do me a favor and cut my heart out?’ He couldn’t just slit his own wrists, take poison, bore himself to death with multiple viewings of The English Patient?”
“No. Deucalion said their kind are built to be incapable of suicide.”
With a sigh of frustration, Michael said, “Their kind. Here we go again.”
